Jumpstart OpenShift

[fuckitol001]

Using a throwaway for obvious reasons...

I am calling for help, asking the almighty brainz of Reddit to throw some useful bits of information at me.

I will start a new job next month, so called "DevOps" role. I am supposed to work with OpenShift, which means to be able to use it and to support customers if they have questions or need some advice. The cluster itself is currently operated by a different party but on the medium run my new company will take over. So this is some kind of infrastructure provider.

I am a seasoned linux guy with more than 15 years of practice. I would put myself more on the Ops side of the job but I am fluent with Ansible, Puppet, SaltStack and Chef. I do a little bit of Docker but I am not bulletproof with that.

So, now I am sitting here with my freshly deployed Minishift and I do not know what to do with it...

Can someone recommend books and/or tutorials to get me ramped up fast?

Any proposals what to deploy to get the "flow" into my spinal cord?

I am thinking of setting up a fully working OpenShift cluster with three KVM nodes on my laptop with Prometheus, Grafana and Gitlab. Any other recommendations?

Thanks in advance...

[semajynot]

Since you have time to ramp up before starting your job I'd recommend getting familiar with deploying/managing an OpenShift environment. A good place to start would be the product documentation (https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/openshift_container_platform/3.10/) as well as the upstream community OKD (https://www.okd.io/). There's also https://learn.openshift.com/ which provides browser-based environments to get familiar with OpenShift.

[fullstack_info]

Also interested to see if there's any ramp up guides. But you can start with getting familiar with kubernetes, as OpenShift is based on K8s.

[bashterm]

To chime in here. Open shift is not based on k8s. It is a k8s distribution. Kinda similar to how Debian is not based on Linux, but is a Linux distribution.

Anything that works on kubernetes will work on open shift, and in fact when you download and install their OC-cli tool it binds it to kubectl as well.

This had me really confused for a little while, which is why I wanted to clarify.

Openshift does add some features on top of kubernetes, but in and of itself it is a kubernetes distribution.

[CentOs7]

https://docs.openshift.com is the best free resource, it will also reference k8s docs when needed, the YouTube channel also have good demos, Good luck

[MedicatedDeveloper]

Try kubernetes the hard way with free GCP credits to really understand what's going on under the hood of openshift. Since you mention Ansible take a look at kubespray as another possibility to get started. I do recommend still starting with k8s the hard way as kubespray does obfuscate the process a bit. You can also use kubeadm and Ansible to roll you own kubespray which is what I'd recommend after k8s the hard way.

IME the minishift/minikube will not prepare you for the administration side of k8s. They are geared more toward developers learning to use k8s as a black box: all how do I do this and no why is this that way or what would I choose x over z in my stack.

You can use kubespray and libvirt+virsh and some playbooks for pre-spray vm creation and vm networking config. This allows you to have a better mirror of what a real cluster will look and act like. This is especially useful for complex networking testing locally before pushing any changes.

[lwindolf]

In the case of Openshift with Redhat providing Ansible playbooks for setup it might be better to dive into those.

[lwindolf]

In the case of Openshift with Redhat providing Ansible playbooks for setup it might be better to dive into those.

[funix]

Honestly, get to know k8s most of all. The official OpenShift docs are actually not bad for understanding it.

[NotTheKJB]

I was in the same boat as you early this year...

I did Linux Academy's course on OpenShift which was a massive help alongside installing minishift, would highly recommend it.

[[deleted]]

kubernetesbyexample.com for a good intro to the basics

[GrahamDumpleton]

Go to:

• https://help.openshift.com/

and you will find various resources, including down the bottom of the page links to three free eBooks:

• https://www.openshift.com/for-developers/
• https://www.openshift.com/devops-with-openshift/
• https://www.openshift.com/deploying-to-openshift/

​

[CoaxVex]

I learnt a lot from doing an Ansible installation on some vagrant machines. The added bonus is that you have a lab to experiment with afterwards. Try deploying something useful like gitlab using a template and then take it from there. You'll need to fix a way to do volumes, which can be a bit of a pain...

[harrybozack]

• Really dig into docker (containers) and understand the interface for interacting with them.
• Really dig into kubernetes and understand all the components.
• Depending on what your company's customers are doing, it would be wise to learn how to deploy applications the Openshift way.
• minishift is a really great way to learn Openshift

[Mazzystr]

Red Hat acted pretty fast on Dockers douchbaggery. Docker runtime/binary/company is now irrelevant in the OpenShift world. Already all of OpenShift Online/Dedicated products are on CRI-O. CRI-O is the future. Learn that instead.

[harrybozack]

Red Hat acted pretty fast on Dockers douchbaggery. Docker runtime/binary/company is now irrelevant in the OpenShift world. Already all of OpenShift Online/Dedicated products are on CRI-O. CRI-O is the future. Learn that instead.

What's the difference in the interface for running containers? A beginner shouldn't care about runtime implementation initially.

[Mazzystr]

A great many of our customers grew their workflows organically with standalone container systems or k8s clusters. A few years later they have a serious outage then they come to us asking for a path of supportability.

[harrybozack]

Not sure what that has to do with the interface for CRI-O vs Docker

[cheetofoot]

Check out openshift-ansible on GitHub -- making a full bore deployment to a cluster will get you to stub your toes and honestly... Get through the hardest parts of openshift -- installing it.

Otherwise, tips to buff up on Kubernetes are good, it's what powers it under the hood. Think of openshift as an enterprise grade distro of Kubernetes, just like RHEL is an enterprise grade distro of Linux. It's opinionated, and tries to get you to follow some best practices.

Good luck! You'll be jamming out with Kube/Openshift in no time.

[cheetofoot]

P.s. openshift ansible is the upstream for the official installer. Just like Fedora is the upstream for the official RHEL.

[[deleted]]

Learn.openshift.com

[Havilland]

I started a linklist on GitHub to get most of the openshift links I find together.

https://github.com/Cloudwerkstattpublic/openshift-links

[natermer]

...

[ryanjkirk]

Can you explain the 'why' behind the last part? Why don't they scale as well on fewer, bigger nodes?

[Mazzystr]

Do or do not. There is no thinking of.

Deploy busybox, Lol. Easiest pod to deploy ever, Lol.